Star Citizen Goes Planetside: First On-Foot Video

Star Citizen‘s crowdfunding has been so successful that the space sim promised the moon. Or rather, it promised planets, and the ability to land on those planets and take part in ground-based exploring and fighting. This past week’s second Citizen Con 2014 Chris Roberts presented the feature in rough form, showing the transition from space to a planet surface and then the player walking around on foot.

As Roberts’ explained up on stage, this is all pretty rough. It’s unoptimised so it stutters at a couple of points; the transition from space to planet is currently fudged but should eventually be seamless; and none of the on-foot systems are currently in place, so there’s no AI, shopping or procedural cities beyond the chunk shown.

The value in the presentation then is mainly to give some sense of the graphical fidelity the team are aiming for, which is fair enough. I’m a big fan of the third-person walk animation, which looks like the player has a penny gripped between their butt cheeks.

More seriously, I do like the look of the early parts of the video, where a spaceship is set spinning and then the player steps out of the chair to walk around the ship. It’s not a feature I’ve missed in Elite: Dangerous, Star Citizens’ most obvious comparison, but it is pretty sweet to be able to look out the window and see space stations and planets zoom by. Also it would make me feel nauseous.

The video above was cut out from the larger livestream, which focused on showing different parts of how Star Citizen’s persistent universe will eventually fit together. You can watch the full livestream on the delightfully-named Space Bum Chronicles YouTube channel.